Who Says the Virgin Never Dies?

By Shannon in Arts & Entertainment on May 19, 2007 9:00PM

Chicagoist is starting to think we're bad luck for business. First Carson's folded, but only the location we frequented. Then CompUSA pulled their plug, not just in Chicago, but half of their locations in the U.S. Now we've discovered that the Virgin Megastore on Michigan — a store we just visited yesterday — is going bye-bye. Seriously, we feel like we need an exorcism here.

Back to the issue at hand: Virgin will be closing their Chicago and Salt Lake City Megastores sometime in July. Business analysts and casual observers lay the blame on online download sites and music piracy. There're still plenty of locations to go around in the UK, but these will be the sixth and seventh closures in America, lowering the number of Virgins to 11. Some people would kill for 11 virgins, we know, but we won't get into that. The 40,000-square-foot space already has a new tenant lined up: Forever 21 (a moniker that always inspires abject depression in us), which will dub this larger store Forever XXI. Apparently two popular stores within a mile of each other wasn't good enough.

We suppose this isn't that big of a surprise. After all, Tower Records just bit it last December. What we find interesting is that the big chain stores are collapsing in on themselves, while there are still plenty of little independent stores around the city; Reckless just opened another location downtown on Madison. We supposed we're mostly to blame for stores like Virgin closing. We've taken to the Internet like a dog swimming in an Alpo river. And we only visited twice, and yesterday only on the way to check out if CompUSA was still open (it wasn't) ... but still, they were the only place we found the very same wonderful headphones we bought whilst in London. Maybe that tipped the cosmic scales and facilitated the closure. That makes us think ... time to start spending more time at Macy's.